Your best bet for a record will probably come from a place like Santa Ana River Lakes, where they plant round tails well in excess of 20 pounds

If you happen to find yourself this winter staring down at a new California state record rainbow trout that you just caught, you’d better hope you caught it on a Pautzke’s product (Fire Bait, Liquid Krill, Fire Corn or the classic Balls ‘O Fire), because they’ll pay ya a cool $10K in cash for breaking the record.

Interestingly enough, the contest (which stared Dec. 1 and runs through April) is even open to anglers who fish those crazy Southern California lakes where they plant ridiculously large rainbow trout…some of which are actually larger than the current state mark of 28 pounds and change.

While I’ll happily take 10 large and a state record of any kind, I’d much rather break that state record with an anadramous rainbow rather than one that arrived in a truck. The contest is limited to the first 25,000 anglers that preregister at Pautzke.com